J.K. Rowling donation angers Scotland-independence advocates

J.K. Rowling said this week she's donated $1.7 million to the "No" campaign in the Scottish independence referendum.

J.K. Rowling said this week she's donated $1.7 million to the "No" campaign in the Scottish independence referendum. (Carl Court / AFP/Getty Images)

Hector Tobar

Scottish nationalist strike back at J.K. Rowling with slurs, insults

J.K. Rowling's announcement that she had donated $1.7 million to the "No" forces in Scotland's upcoming referendum on independence has led to a torrent of Scottish nationalist anger against the creator of the "Harry Potter" series.

The author was called a "traitor," a "Union cow bag" and assorted other insults and expletives, according to the U.K. website Metro. On Twitter, one Edinburgh charity used a slur often directed at assertive women and added the lament, "after we gave her shelter in our city when she was a single mum."

In arguing against Scottish independence, Rowling wrote in a statement this week: "If we leave ... there will be no going back. This separation will not be quick and clean: it will take microsurgery to disentangle three centuries of close interdependence..."

The attacks from the "cybernats," as the social-media-using nationalists are known, quickly drew a response from Prime Minister David Cameron's office, which issued a release saying there is "never any place for abusive behaviour in whatever sphere of life."

Rowling has a Scottish grandfather and lives and works there. She anticipated the attacks in her statement announcing her support for the "No" campaign and compared the most ardent pro-independence forces to the "Death Eaters" in her "Harry Potter" novels.

Like the Death Eaters, "there is a fringe of nationalists who like to demonise anyone who is not blindly and unquestionably pro-independence and I suspect, notwithstanding the fact that I’ve lived in Scotland for 21 years and plan to remain here for the rest of my life, that they might judge me ‘insufficiently Scottish’ to have a valid view."

Rowling is one of the world's richest authors. Her donation to the pro-union "Better Together" campaign helped counter a pro-independence "Yes Scotland" campaign that has been largely funded by a Scottish couple who won the EuroMillions lottery.